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What is it with artists and industrial complexes?

Maybe I would be happier if I just numbed the pain by painting my teeth with Liquid Paper, at night, like everyone else.

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The scenography will be conceived in collaboration with a Montreal architect so as to maximize the functionality of the various places to be set up in the incinerator, all the while promoting an aesthetic approach that corresponds to the scale of the building.

The presentation of the works themselves and the design of novel presentation structures will focus on the increasingly narrowly defined relation between the work, the concrete context of its diffusion and the audience's perception within the interior spaces of the incinerator.

For the uninitiated this probably gives you same uneasy feeling I had the first day I was introduced to the Unix command line.

Note to self: consider proposal to write a Masters of Fine Arts thesis in shell script. You laugh. This is why I am a better Artist than you. No, really.

Anyway.

The first paragraph simply says : We're gonna hang stuff in a way that makes sure people appreciate how big the place is. Leaving aside, of course, our built-in ability to recognize really big things as being, well, big.

The second paragraph says : We know that only a small and rarified group of overly linear thinkers will be able to grok, let alone appreciate, any of the work on display. So for the pea-brains out there we'll just emphasize how small they are in such a big room.

The rest of the piece goes on to recycle (sorry) all the truisms of the industrial complex in an urban landscape, of renewing the space as some kind of sickly-sweet after-school special teen center (read: condos in five years) and as the site for, god help us, a little more self-exploration. All of it, I am loathe to admit, true enough in its own way.

The centers were created for residential use; people building highrises still need to rent their own damn garbage containers. I'm sure that there are some contractors who play fast and easy with the rules but by and large the centers are frequented by plain vanilla folks who want to do the right thing with their paint thinner or that wall they've just torn down in the living room.

The Ãco-centre de la Petite-Patrie is not on the site of the incinerator, proper, but you would be forgiven if you thought it was. It is pretty much the only thing you notice when you're not paying attention enough to keep yourself from falling in to a giant garbage bin.

Frankly, I always thought it was just a matter of time before the center expanded in to the incinerator. Regardless, it is difficult to overstate just how important these places have become to the city-folk.